In a production environment, bottlenecks typically occur from time to time at various steps during the production or fabrication process, influencing the throughput of the process. Similarly, in an integrated circuit manufacturing plant, the throughput of a foundry is generally influenced by various many factors and steps during the fabricating process, which may create bottlenecks. For example, the processing rate, the utilization and the loading density of the equipment are all the factors that will influence the throughput of the foundry.
Typically, the process of manufacturing the ICs includes over three hundred steps, which not only makes the manufacturing process complex in itself, but also makes complex the allocation of resources to perform the processes in an efficient manner. Further complicating the allocation of resources is the use of machines capable of performing multiple processes. For example, a foundry may have m types of machines allocated to perform p different processes. Further, each machine may perform processes at different rates and may not be capable of performing all p processes. In order for foundry supervisors to efficiently utilize the resources of the foundry, it is important to determine a model for the throughput of the resources in which the allocation of the resources maximizes the throughput or capacity of the foundry.